HALLOWEEN WHORE STORIES AT NATIONALS 2004

At some point in life some dude named Joel Silver comes along and makes something so undeniably catchy that you get hooked on it for fifteen years. Joel Silver is a pusher. He produced that shoddy Matrix Series. He made two Die Hards, three Lethal Weapons, a bunch of other Hollywood OxyContin that numbed the senses. In 1968 he borrowed a game of Frisbee from some geeks in Massachusetts, set up teams to compete against each other, drafted rules, and proclaimed to the world that a new disc sport called Ultimate was born.

This narcotic "sport" he originally pushed as a High School prank was now a scourge across America, worse than the CIA dumping crack into the gettos of South Central L.A.. Silver was on the road to being a kingpin in North Central L.A. when he became associate producer on The Warriors in 1979 and the game of Ultimate was holding its first National Championship. Worse than Alcoholics Anonymous, Ultimate twenty-five years later now has 20,000 secret members sneaking around the joint, drinking imported beer and wearing fancy sport clothing.

Every year for the past who-knows-how-long since the drug has been in my system, Ultimate has held its National Championship over Halloween. I’ve spent good hours watching people throw plastic on a day when I should be tormenting others, not myself. I’ve been forced to endure ugly sights that have nothing to do with the pagan spirit of this great holiday and everything to do with sport as a religion.

This year would make a good example. Ostensibly I was missing Halloween to promote an upcoming book on the history of Ultimate that I have been writing. Back home in New York, Halloween people are having fun. My housemate borrowed my humanoid mask and scared his girlfriend. Another friend went to Tarrytown with his girl to get tickled by Ichabod Crane. I drove around in a golf cart on a Sarasota Polo Field picking up Ultimate player’s garbage.

You know you’re a crack whore when you spend four days earning your hotel stay by stuffing banana peels into overstuffed garbage bags so some spoiled bitches who play this sport won’t have to do it themselves. You’re wasting your life away for good when instead of getting paid to cover the tournament as a journalist you’re refilling toilet paper in port-a-johns just to have an excuse to be down in Florida again.

The National Championships are a four-day affair and this year they culminated on Sunday, Halloween. I brought a mask, a one-dollar green one that made me look like a Chinese gremlin. I couldn’t scare a girl into giving me sun block. I was a loser, a junkie. The tournament finished an hour before the sun disappeared over the swamp. I picked up garbage for an hour and then finally got the hell out of there. I took some narcotics to even the equilibrium then I met up with some friends at the beach at night. Halloween night on the Siesta Key in Florida is where I finally got the scary story I had been seeking all along.

"One year I picked up with this team from Chicago and New York led by Mike O’Dowd for Summer Solstice in Eugene. I was just a new, young hotshot Canadian player but these guys couldn’t give a fuck. They let me on the team and I introduced myself as ‘Rick’ but they kept calling me ‘Sally’. I’d say ‘Rick’ and they’d call me ‘Sally’ again so I was Sally to these guys."

"The Chicago and New York guys were a bunch of pricks and O’Dowd had put together this team–‘Long List of Whores’– just to go out to Oregon to beat and insult the West Coast teams, which they did every year. The first year I played with them we made it to the finals. It was a beautiful day on these gorgeous fields by a river and all the other teams from the tournament were out to watch. There were a lot of spectators, almost all of them from the West Coast, you know, kind of good-natured, easy going fellows. The crowd hated us. Everyone there hated to see this team of assholes make it to the finals, so they were all rooting for the other team in the final, a team from Portland or Seattle or something."

"Before the game started, the other team did a rousing cheer. We weren’t into cheers. But we got one together anyway. We gathered in a circle on the middle of the field. Loudly, to ourselves we chanted, "Duh-duhdda-duh-dudda-duh-dah. Duh-dah duh-dah duh-dah. Duh-dadda-duh-dah, Duh-dadda-duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah,duh-dah," and then we all turned around to face the crowd and screamed, "YOU FUCKING CUNT!!"

"The next year I picked up with Long List of Whores again. We had like twenty-five guys, totally stacked with the best players from the East. That year it was brutally hot and humid, around 100 degrees. We cruised through to the finals as usual but this team from San Francisco had a tough semifinal which they barely won with a small squad of ten guys."

"Again a large crowd had gathered to watch the finals, maybe there were 600 people there. Mike O’Dowd and some guys on the team were lounging in chairs before the game began when one of the captains from the San Francisco team came up to him. He said, ‘Hey man, isn’t it great that we made the Finals! I think the crowd is psyched to see a good game, and you know, we want to put on a good show. As you saw, we are kind of short on players and this weather is killing all of us. Since you guys have 25, maybe you could loan us a few players and we could have a good game, since its for fun and we want to have a good show for the people here.’"

"And O’Dowd looks at him for a moment, waits a few long seconds and then finally he begins to speak in a calm manner. ‘What do you do when you see a sheep in the middle of the road, and its been hurt. It’s been hit by a car. It’s wounded, it can barely walk, it’s injured badly, but you want to help out. It’s an ugly situation, no one likes to see a wounded animal, but what can you do? Really, what should you do?’"

"Mike pauses in his story and looks to his teammates, ‘YOU KILL IT!! KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL!!’ We won the finals pretty easily."

That was my Halloween out of town. Drugs, sheep tales and lots of garbage all in the elusive pursuit of happiness through the game of Ultimate. My advice to whoever is reading this: Stick with putting razor blades in apples if you want a fruitful Halloween. Ultimate is a waste of time.

This was originally written for the New York Press because they wanted a "Holiday Away From Home" first-person story for their Gift Guide issue. Well fuck me solid, I figured Halloween was a good enough holiday but they're publishing this thing for THE Holidays -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukkah, New Years, Bush's Swearing-In and the like. I am so out of touch sometimes.

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